Reaching the Lost Young Men—Part 1: Holistic Depornification

This morning, I am starting a new, four-part essay series on reaching lost young men.

Whether we’re talking about “incels,” “America’s lost boys,” the alt-right, or something else, the bottom line is clear. There is a large group of American young men who are facing spiritual crisis. What’s more, they often seem to elude the strategies of Christian publishers or churches. Some do not understand what is going on. Some think the problem is just toxic masculinity. Others do not see a problem.

What follows in the weeks ahead will be my personal thoughts on how Christians and churches need to reach out to these men. In short, I am proposing four distinct Christian, gospel-centered, and church-oriented things that these lost young men need.

1. Holistic depornification

2. The ruthless pursuit of “above-ground living.”

3. Mentorship and “honest affirmation.”

4. Family reconciliation.

These are not the only four things that men need. They are not even necessarily the most important four things. But they are four things that are carefully chosen for the specific cultural moment we are in, and for the specific experiences, hurts, hang-ups, and questions that Millennial and Gen-Z men often have.

Today, the topic is holistic depornification.

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How Pornography Restaged Our World

In March of 2016, Time Magazine’s cover essay was titled “Porn and the Threat to Virility.” The essay featured a number of testimonials from young men, many of whom were Millennials, about the damage that early and frequent exposure to pornography had done to their lives. Many stories followed a familiar pattern: The men began indulging in pornography in their early teens or sooner, and were so habituated to it by the time they began dating that even real sex was “boring.”

Pornography’s omnipresence in the lives of Millennial and Gen-Z men is one of the single most important cultural events in the last century. Prior to widespread home internet adoption in the late 1990s, the chief vehicle for consumption was television, where “premium” cable channels and Pay-Per-View offered X-rated fare. After 2000, Internet speeds increased, and soon the fastest, freest, and most secret way to consume was obvious. Many millennial men were going through puberty at the same time that their household was just getting online. As a result, an entire generation received the lion’s share of their sexual knowledge and experience from explicit media.

In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that television was “re-staging the world,” by which meant that people were beginning to look at the environments of sitcoms and talk shows and desire a world more like that. The same thing has happened with the Internet. As life has migrated online, the Web has similarly re-staged the world, creating an alternative to in-person reality that feels normal and natural for those who have grown up inside its ecosystem.

Photo by PJ Gal-Szabo on Unsplash

Pornography has deeply inflected this re-staging. It doesn’t really matter whether a young man has reported intense addiction, regular exposure, or just casual awareness. The effect is the same. Living in a pornographic society has recalibrated nearly every imagination. Pornography depicts women as sexually eager, seductive, and passive. Pornographic content, by its very purpose, depicts sexual experience as foremost an act of consumption. The object of the pornographic scene has no expectations, no will, and no desire beyond disappearing into the sexual appetite of the subject. There is no romance, no anxiety, and no self-consciousness. She gives him what he desires, and then everything ends.

This depiction of the pornographic object as paradoxically aggressive (with their bodies) and passive (with their wills) significantly shapes the expectations that young men have when they encounter real women. These expectations are, of course, wildly out of sync with reality. Thus, some men deal with the dissonance by reporting mistrust and resentment toward women. They suspect women are deceiving them, holding out on them, or trying to manipulate or embarrass them.

Other men find real women too intimidating or mysterious, and retreat to the comfort of AI companions (who are often designed to match the physical and psychological depictions of women in pornographic content). Still others, especially Christian men, manage to be more sociable with women, but struggle with confidence and security, partially due to the lingering effects of pornographic consumption—guilt, awkwardness, invasive thoughts, etc.

Pornography’s effect on men is severe. Even putting aside issues of addiction, erectile dysfunction, and isolation from reality, pornography sets untenable terms for relationships with women. It hinders care by cultivating lust. It undermines pursuit by acclimating users to instant gratification. It mangles expectations by planting images of “what women are really like.” In short, pornography has wrecked a generation of young men.

What’s needed? A process of holistic depornification.

Substantial Healing of Fear, Fantasy, and Secrets

Holistic depornification means a comprehensive reclaiming of a man’s imagination from the clutches of pornography. This obviously implies that a man would stop consuming pornography and actively seek to uproot the habit from his life. But holistic depornification is more than not looking at porn. It’s a conscious rejection of the way pornography depicts women and sex, and an active pursuit of real sexual love.

Men who’ve been under pornography’s thumb but want out often feel that the best antidote to an obsession with sex is an indifference or even aversion to it. Thus, some of the “Stoic” personalities in the male influencer space project antipathy toward women and sex, talking about them as if they are traps for men to lose their agency and self-worth. This is an understandable error, but it’s still one that accepts pornography’s basic assumptions.

Men are naturally oriented toward sex. We have a spiritual desire for a woman to make love to. John Eldredge’s mega-bestseller Wild at Heart sounds cringy at times, but it gets this point absolutely correct. The quest for sex is, for a man, a spiritual quest, one that is vitally connected to a man’s sense of himself and his purpose.

Holistic depornification means the cleansing of the entire mind, not only from the images of pornography, but also from the attitudes and heart postures that make pornography’s illusions plausible. In order for that to happen, Christian men have to look beyond unwanted habits and identify the emotional realities that are propping them up.

In his book True Spirituality, Francis Schaeffer outlines what he calls Christianity’s “substantial healing of the whole person.” The phrase “substantial healing” is precisely worded. Coming to Christ means healing, but it does not perfect healing. It means real, visible, imperfect, stammering, but progressive healing. Holistic depornification calls for the substantial healing of the whole man.

Francis Schaeffer

One of the roots and fruit of pornographic addiction is fear. Digital sexuality is appealing because it offers a simulation of intimacy without the risks of rejection, awkwardness, or realizations of inferiority. Schaeffer argues that healing fear involves embracing the gospel’s narrative about who we are. Superiority and inferiority are both lies that enable destructive tendencies. A man who is convinced he is superior will find the needs and expectations of other people beneath him, and will be drawn to technology that affirms his superiority and makes no demands on him. Similarly, the man who is convinced he is inferior will seek self-preservation instead of love. He will find the tensions and pains of real relationship too crushing, and he too will find pornography a compelling affirmation of his manhood.

Digital pornography in particular is a technology seemingly calibrated to enslave men who waffle between superiority and inferiority. Holistic depornification takes this seriously. Rather than seeing men trapped in pornographic habits as hopelessly perverted, it provides men with an alternative story of themselves. Men who are trapped in pornographic fantasy are settling for far less happiness than what they could have. They have traded real sexual intimacy for a dirt cheap substitute, but one that feels compelling because it puts them at the center of their own imagination. But the satisfying intimacy a man craves cannot coexist with the spirit of superiority or inferiority. You can have one or the other. Either you stop being the hero of your own psychological drama, and drink deeply of the pleasures of love and relationship, or you can maintain your fantasies and hedge against your fears, while missing out on them.

Substantial Healing of Fantasy

Another aspect of holistic depornification is the repainting of how a man sees a woman. Digital pornography differs from older forms of pornography in the way it comprehensively “re-staged” reality for millions of men. Dirty magazines under a father’s mattress can reveal a woman’s body to a young boy, but those images don’t move or speak. The physical margins of printed media form a boundary where the illusion has to stay. The Internet is different. Many men watched sexual intercourse online before they even knew how different a woman’s body was from theirs. They learned about sex by watching a brutal, dishonest performance of it, and discovering that these brutal, dishonest performances could give them an orgasm again and again.

Learning about sex in this way deeply shapes what the man sees when he looks at a woman. This is not to say that the ideal is for men to see women as basically the same as them. That’s both unrealistic and unwise. Rather, a man should be able to see a woman as a woman, without also seeing her as a potential masturbation tool. He should be able to see her for what she is, not for what she could become in his mind.

1 Timothy 5:2 offers a taxonomy of male-female relationships within the church. Paul commands Timothy to treat older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with all purity. For the Christian man, all relationships with women fall into one of these two categories. For an older woman, you should feel an instinct to listen and care for them as you would your mother. For a younger woman, you should feel an instinct to love and stick up for them as you would your sister.

This is not a “desexualized” relationship in the sense that a man stops being attracted to a woman, or tries to repent of seeing her as a potential wife. But it is a depornified relationship. The man refuses to indulge fantasies. He does not avoid or shrink away from the presence of his sisters (many times, this is done precisely in order to preserve the fantasies). He doesn’t gawk at them from afar or only talk to them when he’s asking for a date. Holistic depornification rejects both superiority and inferiority and refuses to coddle either one through sexual appetite.

This process can be extremely difficult. There will be failures along the way, especially in the area of thought life. But even the act of trying, failing, repenting, and then trying again will, by the power of the Spirit, cut away at the foundation of the pornified imagination.

A life given over to constant fantasy in other areas tends to prop up constant fantasy in sexuality. Thus, I’ve often found it the case that men who can’t shake a porn habit also seem to play a lot of video games, spend a lot of time online, and watch a lot of TV and movies. Unlike porn, the web, gaming, and movies are not sinful, nor are they particularly harmful in and of themselves. But in cases where holistic depornification needs to happen, there has to be a recognition that removing oneself from reality is a habit that lay at the foundation of addiction. The same stress that seems relieved by binging social media or a video game will feel a similar relief watching pornography, or indulging in sexual fantasy.

Holistic depornification is not content with isolating a porn habit and killing it, leaving everything else exactly the same as before. This probably won’t work, and even if it does, there are other destructive ways to flee from reality. Instead, holistic depornification seeks to cut off the felt relationship between escaping reality and experiencing relief from pain.

Substantial Healing of Secrets

One last characteristic of holistic depornification is letting go of secrets. Pornography habits create immense shame, and then weaponize the shame by telling the man that people would hate or reject him if they knew. As a result, secret-keeping becomes second nature. Browsing histories give way to larger secrets: Secret messages, secret purchases, secret routines and activities that are kept from anyone else. This culture of secrecy can often drive a man deeper into the caverns of the Internet. Since nobody knows the real him, the real him becomes more and more something that not even he knows anymore.

In a later post I’ll talk about mentorship and “honest affirmation” as a major tool for rescuing the male soul. For now, though, holistic depornification requires a new spiritual habit of “letting the light in.” People need to know you. You need to know people. A man with nobody in his life who knows what he might be up to at midnight is a man who is going to do something at midnight that will harm him.

Secrets hide the self, and, as we saw previously, the act of hiding is a part of what needs to be healed in a sexually broken man. One of the clear signs of substantial healing is a man who will be open, not only with his private sins, but with this joys and victories, too. Inviting people in to celebrate, accompany, and rejoice with you is a deeply powerful way of practicing the kind of Christian humility that defuses secretive sexual sin.

Conclusion

Holistic depornification is not optional. For men whose emotions and imaginations have been shaped by pornography, an entire superstructure has been built up that thwarts healthy relationships, undermines romance and marriage, and keeps the self in hiding from others. Substantial healing of the whole male person requires dismantling this superstructure piece by piece, and that in turn requires seeing pornography not just an isolated bad habit, or as the worst possible sin, but as an anti-Christian and antihuman narrative that can be replaced.

The best news possible is that the forgiveness and new life that Jesus offers is not passive, but active. It is not a blank slate. It is a completely reset life. Anyone in Christ stands completely forgiven and completely pure already. The goal is to bring one’s daily experience into alignment with what is fundamentally true about you. This is hard news because it means it will be difficult to go against your flesh, your past, and your world. But it is good news because it means every victory and realignment, no matter how small, is the real you. In Christ, you are a pure man. And the healing he offers will make that a daily reality.

In the next post, I’ll talk about one of the first and most important implications of this: The ruthless pursuit of “above-ground” living.